ANGELES CITY – Fifty days before its golden anniversary celebration as a city, the local government here is set to launch and reveal its month-long activities with a kick-off party on Thursday, 3 p.m., in front of the Angeles City Library.
The launch, dubbed as “Limampulung Aldo bayu ing Limampulung Banua” (Fifty days before the Fiftieth Year), will showcase Angeleños talents in several cultural and modern aspects, all set around a golden theme.
Participants who will join the festivities along Sto. Entierro will include drum beaters, cosplayers, bikers, skaters, kite flyers and arnis enthusiasts. According to Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan, the city is in for grand celebration and the Angeleños should expect several activities and events that would celebrate heritage, culture and appreciation of Angeles’ cityhood.
“Our city has gone a long way in the past fifty years, and with this celebration, we shall celebrate this important milestone together,” Pamintuan said.
“As the mayor, I am very grateful that we made it to the 50th year. However, we are also very aware of the responsibility that entails this commemoration, which is why we are making it very special so that everyone can appreciate being an Angeleño.”
Now call this “throwback Thursday” (re) written as it is on this day or “flashback Friday” the day of its publication.
It is a column published almost 17 years ago, then republished over five years ago. But deemed still relevant to the hour.
FORGIVE me for my skepticism over the yet another- police-oplan to rid Angeles City of prostitution. From the late ‘70s when I started column writing for the local papers, that has been a recurring refrain, making me look at these police actions from the perspective of an unknown 18th century writer as “hypocritical impotence, to make spasmodic raids upon their (the prostitutes’) habitation.”
Here’s a piece in my Golpe de Sulat column in the Sun-Star Clark issue of January 27, 1997. THAT ANGELES City is the main course in the international sex menu is no shocking matter anymore. It has always been. It shall always be.
So, one Big Apple Oriental Tours in New York advertised “12-night stay in the Philippines for any American male and select your companion upon arrival in Angeles City for $2,195.” So the ad even had a built-in warranty: the pimp to check the morning after if the client had a good night, if the girl “performed satisfactorily.”
So? So. I remember sometime in the ‘80s, a tour operator in one village in the Australian Outback advertised in a pamphlet “Come to Angeles City. The girls are cheap. 100 pesos only.”
I remember too reading in one local Outback shit of a sheet an article saying, “Filipino men are willing to sell their daughters, sisters, wives and mothers for a few dollars.”
So we have long become not only menial to the world but its whore as well. So? When Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim cleaned Malate and cleansed Ermita of the flesh traders and sex enslavers, there was wide applause in Angeles. Not in oneness with the mayor’s righteous outrage. But for the opportunity the banishment shall offer Angeles.
True enough, Angeles welcomed them all – the white devils from Down Under and from everywhere – with open hearts, hugging arms and scissoring legs, to fi ll the void left by the departed Gringos on Fields Avenue, First Street, and BJ Alley.
So the sex institution that is the Area in Barangay Sta. Teresita continues to operate with impunity. Why not, one papasan there claims immunity, nay, untouchability, courtesy of close kinship with the head honcho of the city.
How and why “rescued girls,” already accompanied by cops, were still pelted with stones when they went back to the Area to retrieve what little is left of their worldly possession bespeak of the grossest moral turpitude there is in this city.
Still wonder why Task Force Magdalena, created by the Honorable Edgardo Pamintuan to check the city’s unbridled, open and blatant display of sexuality and depravity, was dishonorably disbanded only a few months after its birth?
Despite its pretensions to high commerce and rising industry, Angeles City shall always have a service-based economy, founded principally on the overwhelming supply of sexuality.
Look at its present. GROs in karaokes. Stripteasers and go-go dancers in clubs and lounges. Table-girls even in barbeque plazas. Masahistas. The girls of the casas. Pick-up ladies from the settlements. Caddy girls for evening holes-in-one. The Area.
Study its past. The banana and hot dog cutters of Red Baron. The dog-and-girl act of what is now Exotic 2000.
The beer-for-BJ of Studio 1 or something. The shower scenes in just about every other club. The girls near Amagi. The Area. So what do we expect of a city primarily built to satisfy the loins of a conquering imperialist army?
Life is sex. Sex is life. So it was with Sodom. So it was with Gomorrah. So it is with Angeles. SO, AS IT was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
IT IS to be conceded though that much has improved where the moral compass points in Angeles City. And the current Pamintuan administration is doing its darndest best to rid the city of its sin tag with a multi-approach anchored on heritage preservation and promotion.
